volcano

Last year a huge lake of liquid water was apparently found beneath the ice at the Martian south pole. A new study has now examined how it might have gotten there, and concluded that Mars must have had volcanic activity much more recently than is normally believed, and may even still be active today.

Science is amazing, but sometimes scientists do get a little niche in their studies. Here is a list of the weirdest science stories we came across this year, from twerking robots to bizarre snail-to-snail memory transference and a fountain-of-youth sarcophagus conspiracy that sums up 2018.

​Would you want to climb up an active volcano to deposit a sensor at its crater? Probably not, and it's something that safety-conscious volcanologists would prefer not to do, too. With that in mind, British scientists have created drone-deployed sensing devices known as "dragon eggs."

The unusually cold year of 1816 has been linked to one of the most powerful volcanic eruptions in recorded history, and now we may know how. A new paper explains how electrified ash from the eruption could have “short-circuited” the Earth’s ionosphere and triggered the “Year Without A Summer.”

Asteroids are the leftovers from the formation of the solar system, and they can tell us a lot about those early years. Now scientists have studied a weird space rock and found that it’s the oldest known igneous meteorite, dating back to one of the very first volcanic eruptions in the solar system.

The Medusae Fossae Formation is a huge rocky structure on Mars that has had scientists puzzling over its origins for decades, but the new work suggests it’s the result of massive volcanic eruptions that would have changed the climate of the Red Planet.

Aarchaeologists excavating a new site in Pompeii have uncovered a new victim of the disaster, who has quite a story to tell. The skeleton was found with its head crushed beneath a huge stone block that was thrown by the force of the volcanic cloud.

A team of scientists may have developed a new method of predicting potentially deadly eruptions, by studying tiny crystals contained in volcanic debris. In the future, the research could provide greater warning, and so more evacuation time to at-risk populations.

According to new research, the colossal caldera of the Yellowstone supervolcano was created by not one, but two powerful and closely spaced eruptions that took place some 630,000 years ago. The eruptions were powerful enough to affect the global climate as the planet was recovering from an ice age.

The Moon isn’t quite the wasteland we might assume it to be. There’s more water up there than scientists previously thought, and it was a far wetter and more active place in the distant past. Now, a NASA study has found evidence that the ancient Moon may once have had a watery atmosphere.